To Mark Weitz, For Everything, With Love

An excerpt from Sundays at Sarah's by Martha Manno

Nothing happened, I swear it. Nothing that you could point your finger at and say was wrong. Yet, when I think back on it all, it is disturbing and maybe that's why I never told anyone about it. After eighth grade we never talked about him among ourselves; we went on to high school and were diluted in the greater pool of high school kids and never saw Mark Weitz again.

We called him Mark, not Mr. Weitz, except during English class. That was the way he wanted it. And of course, we agreed. Why wouldn't we? It was a tribute to how special we were. Maybe it was the start of it all.

He was a tall, bulky man, without physical grace. We knew that from watching him play tennis after school with Mr. Morrissey, the chemistry teacher. He would lunge after balls he could never hope to return and trip over his size eleven feet, while we sat on the sidelines, snapped our gum and laughed at him.

But as clumsy as he was, his eyes redeemed him. He had the most luminous pale green eyes, like a certain shade of jade, cloudy, like a pond whose bottom you couldn't see. His eyelashes were the long, luxurious black eyelashes of a child. His skin was milky white and we loved to see it blush red. We'd say anything to make him blush. The color would climb up his neck and merge with his curly black hair, that same curly black hair that seemed to cover him, head to toe, that escaped from the collars of his shirts.

We were cruel to him in the teasing way that fourteen year old girls can be cruel. We were the literary club, a group of five girls, and we met every Wednesday afternoon, in Mark Weitz's classroom, after school. It was our mission to write, and to publish, the junior high school literary magazine. Mark Weitz was our faculty resource person, our guru, our boy. We owned him. All 192 pounds of him. All of his 23 years.

He was a new teacher that year, fresh out of college, certified in English, secondary level. He said he had always wanted to be a teacher. One Saturday, he gave us a tour of his alma mater. There were the classrooms where he heard so many lectures, here the library where he studied late at night, there the auditorium where he went to poetry readings. He hoped some of us would become poets, writers, maybe even teachers like himself.

His house, where he still lived with his parents, was walking distance from the college. "Come on Mark, show us where you live, show us your house," Tracy insisted. He gave in, his parents weren't home, he would show us his house.

He pointed it out as we turned the corner of his street and pulled up into the driveway of a modest, two-story brick house, with Tudor trim. It was a gray day and the house looked sad. I didn't want to go in, I sensed Mark's hesitation. But there was no stopping Tracy and I wasn't going to wait in the car alone.

We had gotten as far as the living room when Tracy announced to Rosalie that we had to see Mark's room, and though he protested and tried to stop her, she and Rosalie marched right up the stairs. He followed close behind them, looking resigned to this further indignity. Not wanting to be left out, I dogged his heels.

It turned out to be a small room with dull, brown curtains that seemed as though they might have hung there for a lifetime. At first I thought the pattern was cowboys on horses, but on second glance it turned out to be horse- drawn carriages with ladies in long dresses. On the wall hung pennants from college and high school and in the corner was one of those earnest, wooden desks with three drawers on one side and a keyhole cut out for the knees on the other. Did he grade our English compositions at that desk? Rosalie wanted to know. I thought Tracy would never stop laughing because the desk was child-size and we all realized that Mark's long, ungainly legs could never fit under it. Mark stood in the doorway, silent. A minute later he drove us home.

It was always Tracy who started things but we others weren't ever far behind. Tracy was the cruelest of us and at almost fifteen, the oldest of us five. Jim Morrison of the Doors was her idol. His name was drawn on her hands and her bedroom walls were plastered with posters of him. To her, Mark Weitz was as unlike Jim Morrison as a man could be. But we'd never get to meet Jim Morrison and Mark was here now, so that year we gathered around him like hens around a rooster.

Were we openly flirtatious? Weren't we! I can remember Rosalie waving her wrist under his nose, offering him a whiff of her new cologne. Didn't he blush then, too?

I teased him along with the others, stung him with sarcastic barbs, made jokes at his expense whenever they popped into my head. But there was always an undercurrent of something else, that what the two of us shared was special and that it was okay for me to tease him because he knew what lay just under the surface.

I never showed the others the notes he wrote me. I can't even quite remember when they started, only that when I passed his room between classes he might sometimes be standing there, seeming to be waiting for me. And he would ever so discreetly hand me a single, folded piece of lined paper. He might have been handing out a homework assignment, except that these were only for me.

They were marvelous creations, not quite poetry, not pictures, but both and neither. They were about me and not about me, prognostications of my future, fragments of my past, but at the same time, so vague and surrealistic, they may have been his own dreams and memories. There were pictures, too and sometimes bits of string glued on, or a scrap of newspaper. And once a picture of him as a boy: the same dark curls, those same long eyelashes and a smile of innocence and light. I never showed it to the others, knowing how they'd laugh at him.

I couldn't tell if I was falling from grace or falling into grace or even falling in love with him. And I didn't tell Tracy or the others how I felt for fear they would have laughed at me, too.

Mark was so generous with himself, telling us stories about his own embarrassing adolescence: the dates, the proms, the rejections, the hurts. And he took us places we otherwise wouldn't ever have gone: museums, plays, even ice skating in Central Park. We spent most of our weekends together, some combination of the literary club, often Tracy, always me.

One Saturday afternoon, in early March, four of us girls were going with Mark to Coney Island; none of us had ever been. We talked about it all week in school. But at the last minute Rosalie and Dena got asked to double-date with two guys in the ninth grade. So that left Mark and Tracy and me.

I walked to Tracy's house. Mark would pick us up in his green Pontiac at the end of her street at exactly ten. Tracy had been out already and bought Irish soda bread in honor of St. Patty's day the next week. It sat on her bed in the white paper bag from the bakery.

Her tongue flicked the retainer out of her mouth and held it there suspended for a long moment before flipping it back into place over her front teeth.

"Do you think it's weird that he takes us places, that he likes us so much?" I asked her.

"No," her tone was adamant, "How could he not like us? We're perfectly adorable." As she said it she crossed her eyes.

"Yeah, I guess." I didn't think I was adorable. I was very concerned that year with just being likeable.

"Do you tell your mother when we're going some place with him?" I knew the answer to that already but I needed to ask it again.

"No," again adamantly, "I tell my mother as little as possible. You know that."

"Hmm," was all I said.

"You worry too much," she said, "Hey, look at the time- let's move."

I tossed down the Cosmo I had been paging through and took a last look in the mirror. I had to admit I looked pretty good that day. My hair had stayed smooth instead of frizzing up. And I was wearing a new top that was a stretchy rib knit and finally I was getting boobs. Mark would have to notice.

It was a cold but bright, sunny day. We all three sat in the front seat with me in the middle. Tracy kept up a monologue of the sights as we passed them and quick made up funny stories of people we saw. There was no need for Mark or me to talk much. Tracy pulled off pieces of the soda bread and passed them to me and I fed them to Mark as he drove. I would put the piece up to his lips and he would take it with his teeth and pull it into his mouth. It soon turned into a game with him trying to bite my fingers before I could take them away. He was never fast enough to bite me but once he let his lips come together on my fingers in what might have been a kiss.

We walked along the boardwalk and ate hot dogs and watched the waves wash in and out. The three of us held hands as we walked back to the car.

It was a wonderful spring and then suddenly it was over. A lurching move during a tennis game reawakened an old back injury and put Mark in traction, in the hospital. Tracy and the others in the literary club sent him funny cards, but I told Tracy that the two of us had to find a way to visit him. We spent a long time on the phone with the transit authority figuring out the buses we'd need to get us there.

He seemed surprised to see us at visiting hour, a box of Whitman's chocolates in Tracy's hands, a bunch of daisies and a copy of the just published literary magazine in mine. I let Tracy do the talking, while I hung back at the foot of the bed, pretending to study the apparatus they had attached him to. Poor Mark. He looked so helpless strung up like that, like a fly caught in a web.

He opened the chocolates and Tracy found her two favorites and scarfed them down. Mark held out the box to me but I shook my head no. I didn't think I could get anything past the lump in my throat. Then Tracy announced she was off to find a cigarette machine. She had just discovered smoking and loved to sneak a pack when her mother wouldn't find out about it. That left me alone with Mark and he motioned to me to come closer. I was going to sit in the chair next to him but he patted the blanket on the bed.

We didn't speak for a moment, just looked at each other. I tried to feel myself floating in the pools of his eyes as I had done before but I was too conscious of him now and what he might be thinking. I knew this was the beginning of the end.

"I've missed you," he said and then tried to make it lighter than it sounded by saying he had missed all us girls. He asked about the literary magazine and whether it had come out on time. I opened the copy I had brought for him and showed him the dedication. I had written it myself but I didn't tell him that. I wasn't looking at his eyes anymore but settled instead on the weave of the blanket.

"Graduation's in one week. Will you be there?" I asked him, without looking up.

"No," his voice was soft, "I'll be home in bed for a week, after they let me out of here."

Then the words started forming in my head and I didn't mean for them to be spoken out loud, but suddenly they were there, hanging in the air between us, "Will we see each other after that?"

There was a long pause during which I re-wove a patch of the blanket again and again with my eyes. His voice was hollow and cheerful, "You can come visit in the fall, after your classes at the high school let out."

I looked up at him then, even though I had begun to cry. But, I wanted to say, what about Saturdays, what about Coney Island? What about the notes you wrote especially for me? He seemed to know what I was thinking.

"No." He shook his head, took my hand in his, and just touched it to his lips. "No," he said, "We can't."

I knew I would never go back to the junior high to visit.

Tracy and I had to wait on the street corner in the plexi-glass shelter for nearly twenty minutes for the right bus to come along. The June air felt warm and sultry. Tracy smoked a cigarette and tried to form smoke rings with her mouth. I was glad she was preoccupied and that we didn't need to talk.

The bus finally pulled up at the curb and just before I got on I took one long look back at the hospital up three flights to where I thought his room was. Then I felt the tug of Tracy's hand and heard her whining voice, "C'mon, will ya? It's gonna leave without us." I settled into my seat as the bus pulled away and merged into the flow of traffic. A gush of warm air came through the open window and blew dust in my eyes, but I forced them to stare straight ahead, out the front windshield of the bus, as we moved inexorably forward.

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Martha Manno's short stories have appeared in The Newport Review, online in Poetry Midwest, and in many other journals in New England. Martha is the founder of Little Pear Press.